


the words that come out easy

by strikinglight



Series: The Closest Thing [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: College, Established Relationship, M/M, Moving On, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6282394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Today, Koushi decides he wants to focus on piecing things together. </p>
</blockquote><br/>In which the graduates visit Karasuno, and find many things new.
            </blockquote>





	the words that come out easy

**Author's Note:**

> Or, _How to Get Away with Rejecting Your Kouhai: a Memoir_ by Sugawara Koushi, edited by Sawamura Daichi.
> 
> Follow-up/remix to the first pining Kags fic because someone get this poor child a happy ending.

Koushi wakes up to sunbeams across his face and dragonflies at his window.

His first thought, once his brain finally manages to shake off the initial waking-up haze of _who am I’s_ and _what year is it’s,_ is that he should probably get out of bed. Tidy up at least a bit. There are still textbooks half-wedged under his pillow, and his hands are spotted with highlighter-yellow as he lifts them to rub the sleep from his eyes, relics of a first college trimester conquered and a summer break well-earned. His second thought is that he can’t get up—not yet, not with the air so muggy and the world moving so slow, and this morning his first chance to sleep in after what feels like a thousand days.

His phone—which takes some scrabbling and groping to find, as it’s somehow managed to wedge itself partway under his futon—tells him it’s almost eleven-thirty, that he’s snoozed his alarm five times, and that he has four unread messages.

Predictably, the first three are from Daichi. Koushi finds himself chuckling at how clearly he can hear his voice as he reads:

_9:30 AM  
Good morning! Are you awake?_

_10:30 AM  
Just got back from running. Will head over there in a bit. You’re still not awake, are you?_

_11:15 AM  
On my way. Please be alive when I get there!_

The last message is from Hinata, probably speed-typed extra-sneakily under his desk halfway through English class—Koushi knows they won’t be let out for lunch until noon.

_11:27 AM  
You’re still coming today, right?? What time???_

 

* * *

 

Koushi knows it’s him the minute he breezes past. They haven’t known each other—been teammates—for too long, but even so, there’s a distinctive sense of purpose to the way he moves that’s unusual for an underclassman. An easy grace like he’s comfortable in his skin, and a proud tilt to the head Koushi’s certain he couldn’t imitate even now, in the full flush of his third year.

Everyone’s always going on about how they play the same position, but the morning is too bright, too dewy—too _nice,_ on the whole, to think about what that means. Koushi loves his morning walks too much. Besides, it’s never too early to strike up a good rapport, so he calls out.

“Kageyama!”

What happens next is just a little funny—how Kageyama’s head snaps around so quickly Koushi feels the whiplash, the eyes wide over his shoulder like he wants to keep running. For a moment it looks as if he’s going to bolt, pull ahead of Koushi and keep running until he’s past the school gates and safe in his classroom. His feet, however, seem to have other ideas—seemingly against his will they’re slowing, coming to a reluctant, shambling walk, and for his sake Koushi picks up speed, to close the distance faster.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt your run.” He smiles, tries for friendly and reassuring. “I just wanted to say good morning. You can go on if you like.”

But Kageyama doesn’t go on. He stays. They’re side by side on the pavement now, though he seems to be working extra hard to make himself smaller, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head down.

“You didn’t interrupt me.” This is addressed to the stretch of sidewalk in front of them, falling away under their feet as they walk. He doesn’t talk much off the court, and Koushi’s always surprised by how deep his voice is when he does—rough and gravelly, almost a growl. “I’ll walk with you if it’s not too much trouble.”

“I’d love that,” Koushi says, and means it. He bites his lip against a grin when Kageyama starts, skittish and shifty, like a cat—like he doesn’t know where the kindness comes from.

 

* * *

 

He’s half-sitting, half-lying by the dining table with a half-finished bowl of cereal in front of him when he hears Daichi’s key click in the lock, followed by his cheery “Sorry to intrude!” from the genkan. He blinks once and Daichi’s there, at once hilarious and terrifying with his arms folded and his heels poking out over the edges of Koushi’s too-small house slippers.

“You aren’t even dressed,” he says. Daichi’s voice is stern, as stony as Koushi remembers it being during team scoldings and especially tense games, but he also knows the tightening at the corners of his lips is a smile that’s been reined in on the way out.

Koushi grins up at him slow and languid, head tipped to one side where it leans against his hand. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Suga, honestly.” Daichi flushes all the way down to his collar— _score,_ Koushi thinks, because it’s still funny to set him off balance after all this time—and redirects his attention to the bowl, the handful of cornflakes in their puddle of milk. He clears his throat. “Are you going to finish that?”

“It’s yours,” he says. Then, to show that he can just as easily be good, he unfolds himself, pitching slightly to one side as he finds his footing and pads barefoot to the far side of the room. “Let me just change. Two minutes, I promise.”

Daichi wrinkles his nose when Koushi tilts his head up to kiss him on the cheek. “I’ll give you five.”

He’s half-behind the sliding door and pulling off his shirt when he remembers.

“Does it look like rain, Daichi?”

“It’s pretty clear out.” Daichi answers between swallows. It’s always been comfortable to have him present, steady and at ease here in this new space. Koushi picks a fresh shirt from a drawer and pulls it over his head, concentrates on the small, ordinary sounds to steady his breathing—Daichi rising and walking to the kitchenette, the spoon clattering quietly against the rim of the bowl as he sets it down in the sink. “Should be okay.”

 

* * *

 

Last July resurfaces so clearly sometimes that it doesn’t take anything at all for Koushi to think himself back there. He’s waiting out the first rain of the summer, and Kageyama’s thrusting his umbrella toward him point-first like a weapon, and it takes all of his common sense not to leap out into the street to avoid a stabbing.

“You can have this,” he tells the toes of Koushi’s shoes. “I like to jog in the rain.”

It should be a joke. It would be a joke, coming from anyone else, but because it’s Kageyama every word is a bullet. _I like to jog in the rain._ Absurd as the rain itself, pouring without warning out of the pale sky. So absurd Koushi almost believes it.

“I couldn’t—”

“Please.” More absurd still is the note of pleading Koushi hears now beneath the rough, but Kageyama doesn’t give him any more time to think. He twists the umbrella around and hangs it by its hook in the crook of Koushi’s arm, dipping his upper body forward in the stiffest imaginable bow before he runs away.

Koushi lingers in front of the supermarket, watching him go. The oranges he’s just bought for his mother have gone heavy as a bag of boulders in his arms.

It’s sunny again the next morning—a kind of cosmic joke—and easy enough to find his house after Hinata texts him the address, with the added reassurance that Kageyama’s mom was really nice to him the one time he went over to deliver homework on a sick day. Koushi wonders if it’s childish for his hand to hover so long over the doorbell regardless, or for the relief to flood through him when she’s the one to answer the door.

“Oh, Tobio?” She looks out at him from the doorway, gentle and apologetic, the expression alien on a face that’s a strangely close match to her son’s otherwise—the blue eyes, the sharp chin. “He’s still asleep. I don’t think he’s feeling well.”

“Ah, um, that’s probably my fault.” Koushi feels the guilt squirm in the pit of his stomach, tries his best to smile it away as he hands over the umbrella and the small plastic bag. “Kage—Tobio-kun was good enough to lend this to me yesterday. I figured he’d need it back.”

“The oranges are for him too,” he adds. Last night he’d picked out the two biggest fruits of yesterday’s dozen, testing the ripe weight of them—and now he’s too conscious, suddenly, of his empty hands. “As a thank-you.”

“I’ll make sure he gets them.” She smiles at him then. His heart sinks a little at the warmth in her voice. “He’s lucky to have such caring senpai.”

“You’re very kind. We’ll do our best to look after him.”

After she closes the door Koushi finds he has to take a breath and lean against the wall, knees weak with everything he now understands.

 

* * *

                                                                    

Daichi falls asleep on his shoulder on the train back to Torono, while Koushi listens to music and stares out the window and tries to ignore the way the old worry is feathering again—as it still does from time to time, a lot more often than he cares to admit—in the pit of his stomach.

Over the last three months it’s been easy to keep busy, a real stepping-up-to-the-plate kind of busy he owes to the hundred and one stresses of university life, both academic and not. Managing his homesickness has been the least of it, with his mother constantly emailing him recipes and his little sister calling two nights a week to talk his ear off with stories. There are papers to be written and hours of research work to be done in the big university library with its towering stacks and subzero air-conditioning, maps of the city to be studied as he figures out the closest and most cost-efficient places for groceries, laundry, coffee dates.

It’s a small blessing that the people he meets are kind and accommodating and—in the case of most of his classmates—just as cheerfully clueless as Koushi himself. And it’s everything that Daichi is there, one hand light on the small of his back as they navigate hallways together, squeezing his elbow gently before they separate at the end of their morning break. It helps especially that he comes by for dinner most nights and always offers to split for the groceries, insisting that it’s all cup noodles and chips over at the dorm, knowing all the while that Koushi finds it soothing to be able to cook for two.

Most days it’s a good stress, and Koushi can tell himself it feels good to keep moving. Most days it doesn’t feel like running away, though he still doesn’t know what to do about the little twinges he gets, walking Daichi to the gym for training before he heads home, or remembering that he hasn’t been back to Karasuno since March. It’s a quiet, deep-down, hollow feeling, not quite an ache or a pain, but—

Daichi’s head moves against his shoulder; his fingertips find Koushi’s wrist under the sleeve of his cardigan. “Stop, Suga.”

“Stop what?”

“Worrying,” Daichi says, and closes his eyes again.

 

* * *

 

They’re sitting on the pavement outside Sakanoshita’s the first time they talk about it, sometime in October. They’re still in their practice gear, black jackets zipped up against the chill, and Koushi’s mind feels split three ways—part of him cycling back through the day’s training regimen, another part distracted by the light of the streetlamps in the trees, making red and yellow shadows in the fall foliage. The last part is hovering uncertainly beside Daichi in the here and now, at a complete loss about how to reconcile everything.

“I’m a little scared about the new play.”

“The one with Kageyama?” The words are quiet, prompting— _Are you going to tell me why, or do I have to ask?_ “You’ve done combination attacks before, though, haven’t you?”

“Yes, and they’re not a problem, but—” Suddenly Koushi is grasping, clumsy. “Kageyama’s—”

To tell the truth, Kageyama had been perfect. As brilliant as ever, and so easy to talk to Koushi could barely believe he was the same kid who’d declared, months ago, that he’d do the work of six players on his own if he could. Koushi remembers Kageyama’s eyes trained on him with such attention, how his face had almost lit up as he described the necessary arc of the ball.

 _Trust me?_ Koushi had said, only to realize a heartbeat too late that that might have been the wrong thing to ask. His fingers twist together in his lap at the memory, squeezing so hard the bones come together.

They always hold hands during difficult conversations—and to their credit, they’ve survived a good few of them in their time. He’ll never take it for granted that things are as easy with Daichi as he knows they look sometimes. He’ll never take it for granted that things are as easy as Daichi always makes them feel when he reaches across and untangles Koushi’s left hand from his right so he can hold it like a fragile thing between both of his own.

“Suga, you know he likes you, right?”

He’s not prepared to hear it stated so baldly. The revelation is so surprising it makes him want to laugh, but his voice is dry in his throat, and what comes out instead is a soft, strangled sound. “Is that what you call it?”

“I don’t really want to say it the other way, if you know what I mean.” He rubs his thumb over Koushi’s knuckles, gently, depending on the touch to soften the words. “Did you figure I knew?”

Koushi sighs. “Some captain you’d be if you didn’t.”                                                                                                          

“Do you like him too?”

“That’s not funny, Daichi.”

“It’s not exactly supposed to be,” he points out, making sure to catch Koushi’s eye the second he looks up from the pavement in front of them, hold it steady. “I have to know what you’re going to do.”

“I love you.” They don’t say it aloud often, because it feels unnecessary to declare something so self-evident. The sky is blue. Water is wet. _I love you_ —like the long held gazes, the holding hands—is for difficult conversations. “But we can’t lose him.”

He knows he can rely on Daichi to hear all the different ways he means this, to recognize all the reasons Kageyama is precious to them both. “No, we can’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” Koushi says. He can feel himself sigh all the way down to his bones. “There’s no way you feel good about this.”

“I don’t,” Daichi agrees. The statement is measured for all its straightforwardness, careful, tiptoeing around being accusatory. “But let me take care of that part, okay? Let me handle it.”

Koushi wants to tell Daichi he’s too good, but his heart is in his mouth and he can barely breathe. He breaks eye contact then, hangs his head and covers his face with his free hand, and all he can say is, “Okay.”

“Everything else, we can just keep playing by ear.”

“Okay.”

“Suga.” By now their palms are too warm and slippery with sweat, but Daichi doesn’t let go. Instead he squeezes once, just hard enough to be a reminder—he’s still here, still present and real. “Suga, please don’t cry. Ukai might think I’m breaking up with you.”

Koushi squeezes back. “I’m not crying.”

 

* * *

 

There are more texts in his inbox when he gets off the train. The most recent one is from Asahi— _Probably won’t make it this afternoon, the kids don’t want to let me go, but let’s have dinner or something?—_ but there’s a small stream from Hinata trailing right along behind, beginning with _We can’t wait to see you!,_ zooming straight through to _Are you on the train yet??_ and ending with _We’ll just be in the gym. You still know the way, right?_

Koushi figures that in the last three months he's probably spent more time talking to Hinata than he ever did over the year they played together—and he knows those were no small hours, just from how Hinata’s always tended to go on and on and on, barely stopping for breath. He’s reread the thread so many times he practically has it memorized. He can summon it up as they walk, cycle back through the messages he sent in April, May, June. _Please just look after him. Let me know how he’s doing. I guess he’ll tell you when he’s ready? How was he today?_

Interspersed, four or five messages from Hinata for every one of Koushi’s—and he chuckles, in spite of himself, rehearsing in his imagination the sound of the tone going off again and again in his empty apartment, all the times he's ever had to bow his head apologetically in class or in the library and stuff his phone into his bag to cover up the incessant vibrating.

April: _What’s wrong, Suga-san? Why’s Kageyama sad? Should I ask him?_

May: _He’s okay, I think. Better than a few weeks ago. He just looks tired. But he’s stopped spacing out in class—he stayed awake for all of English today. How are you, Suga-san?_

June: _Suga-san! I’m going to ask him to do some extra practice with me. We’re still fixing the new quick. The new-old quick. Do you think that would help?_  

Daichi sees Koushi glance at his phone before he slides it back into his pocket, smiles at him sideways as they walk up the hill. “Hinata again?”

Today, he decides he wants to focus on piecing things together.

 

* * *

 

The ball’s in Kageyama’s court and Koushi thinks it’s the most tired metaphor there is. He could say something. He could say nothing, leave this to hang over all of their heads until they have enough time and distance built up between them and everyone forgets. Both possibilities seem equally likely. When it comes to this, Koushi finds he can no more read Kageyama than he can see through a brick wall. He’s exhausted but he hasn’t moved, no closer to answers in January than he had been in October or April. He knows a little, but not nearly enough.

The truth is that Koushi only knows the way Kageyama looks, in the rare instances that he forgets himself, in-between moments when it seems as though nobody’s watching—the intense, penetrating attention. Some spark of longing Koushi has to look away from and pretend he hasn’t seen.

Koushi wonders if Daichi’s ever seen that look. He wonders how it makes him feel, but his insides twist so painfully at the thought that he has to abandon it.

“I really don’t know what to _do.”_ There’s no real lead-in to these conversations anymore, these days. Koushi just talks, while he’s taking down the net or picking up stray balls, and Daichi listens. He knows Koushi’s haunted by it, grows only more so with every month that passes; maybe they both are. “Tell me what to do, Daichi.”

 “Stop worrying, for one.” This month it’s _Stop worrying._ A month or so ago it had still been _Everything’s going to be all right,_ but Daichi’s nothing if not a realist, and he knows better than to make promises he can’t deliver on. It’s okay, Koushi thinks. The repetition helps.

“I just—” He always feels like he’s holding his breath, these days. “I don’t want to mess this up.”

“You won’t.” Daichi reaches out, in the way that he always does when they’re running out of things to talk about, and Koushi comes close, fits against him—forehead bent to nestle in the crook of Daichi’s neck, Daichi’s hands spread wide and warm at the small of his back. “Hey, come here. You won’t, I said.”

 

* * *

 

When they hit Karasuno their first instinct is still to make for the gym, but they take the long way around. It’s partly to avoid interrupting practice, but also partly to spend a few minutes lingering, retracing old steps—circling around the back of the main building, the girls’ gym, the club rooms. It’s easier than it seems, to give in for just a little while to a nostalgia they always joke they’re too young to feel.

It feels like some kind of mirage when they catch sight of Kageyama out by the taps, hands cupped in front of him to catch the water running down. Koushi tugs at Daichi’s arm and they trade uncertain looks, do a double-take each—all their memories are of him in the thick of things, always first in the running line or getting a head start on the warmups. It’s so unlike him to start slow, to give himself breaks like this, it doesn’t even seem real.

He’s splashing his face when they walk into his line of sight, and even from a distance Koushi can see how he starts when he finally sees them—water in his hair and trailing down his forehead, all the world a little out of joint.

“Kageyama! Long time!”

Daichi finds his bearings first, straightening up and pulling ahead of Koushi to clasp Kageyama’s arm, all smiles and easy familiarity as they begin to trade pleasantries Koushi can’t hear. It’s amazing, Koushi thinks, and impossible—nothing short of a miracle how Kageyama relaxes when Daichi comes in close, for all that his eyes remain wide and bewildered, as if he’s only just woken up.

But soon Kageyama’s eyes are on his face and there’s no way he can hover around the outside of the conversation and still call himself a good senpai.

“How are you?” It’s so many questions at once. Koushi’s hand is another, as it reaches through the air between them and settles on his shoulder, squeezing.

“I’m doing well,” Kageyama says, and this, too, feels loaded, thick with everything they probably don’t need to say. He’s still bad at smiling, but his shoulder is still and solid under Koushi’s hand. “I hope you’ve been well too.”

 

* * *

 

It’s at once right and wrong, Koushi figures, for everything to end this way—with Kageyama’s second button in his hand.

Truth be told, he can barely believe it; it’s almost miraculous, the control it must have taken to scale all of one year down to the size of a small metal disc, turn the time into a real thing you can hold and hand over, breathless.

“Am I right about what I think this means?”

In another life it would be funny. Koushi has sisters and cousins and classmates to thank for teaching him what the second button means. He wonders how Kageyama knows; he can’t even imagine Kageyama talking to a girl, much less to ask about something as delicate as this concern of hearts. Yachi, maybe—it would be something she’d do, try and find him a way out that didn’t involve too many words.

“I’m—I’m not sure it’s proper form, since you’re the one who’s graduating, but I—” Kageyama is a livewire, eyes darting, hands opening and closing so restlessly Koushi’s tempted, for a moment, to grab his wrists and hold them until they’re still. “I thought it would be right to tell you, just to— I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to say it.”

The apology is so unexpected that it cuts him. Koushi knows he’s the one who should apologize, but he only gets as far as “I’m s—” before Kageyama rushes in to interpose, a rough bark of “No!” in the silence Koushi’s scared will reach the team all the way back at the gate.

He stops, continues more softly.  “No, please, you’ve been—” Another stop, and Koushi’s heart drops. He doesn’t want to think about how that sentence might have ended, doesn’t want at all to start thinking, however theoretically, about _might-have-beens_. “If I’ve troubled you—”

“No,” Koushi says—and once more, with feeling, in the hope that he’ll believe, “No, never.”

“Kageyama, you mean a lot to me, do you know that?” As soon as the words are out of his mouth he knows they’re not enough. There are no words in any language for this—and maybe that’s something they both recognize, something Kageyama knows when he pulls his lips back from his teeth in that strange smile that looks a little like he’s about to bite someone and a little like he’s in pain. Koushi knows that smile like the back of his hand by now; it’s had him curled into himself from laughter on the floor of the gym, clutching at his sides more times than he can count.

He knows, though—it would be wrong to tell him that and have it change nothing. So instead Koushi says _You mean a lot to me_ and hopes it’s the last thing to stick in his memory because everything else is too sad.

“I’ll try to remember,” Kageyama says to the toes of his shoes. “Thank you, Sugawara-san.”

 

* * *

 

They hear Kageyama’s name, the syllables drawn out long and loud as a trumpet blast, before the top of Hinata’s head appears in their line of sight—the rest of him following shortly after, and then his hands are colliding with Kageyama’s shoulders, the momentum propelling him off his feet into the air.

“What are you taking forever to drink water for? Ennoshita-san told us to start running without you!”

“So start without me!” Kageyama growls, bent nearly double under Hinata’s weight; he sounds the same as he used to, but also not quite. “It’s not like I don’t know how to run, you know!”

Koushi can’t put his finger on what’s changed quite yet—besides the conspicuous absence of the usual _dumbass,_ and the way Hinata’s arm has settled in a loose coil around Kageyama’s neck. Kageyama doesn’t push him off either, and Hinata doesn’t quite pull away, even if his attention snaps so quickly toward Koushi and Daichi it’s dizzying.

 “Whoa, Daichi-san! You look really square!” His eyes are round as saucers, so big they look half about to pop out of his head. Do they look so different, Koushi wonders, after just three months away? “And you’ve gotten skinny, Suga-san!”

There’s really no way to answer. Koushi examines his wrist, blinks at the space between his fingers and the bone when he curls them in a ring around it, and drops his hands, perplexed. Daichi takes the remark about his squareness—whatever that means—in good humor, waves them off with promises of meat buns after practice just like old times (even for the new kouhai, he assures Hinata, because how many of them can there be, really?). Neither of them miss the subtle movement of Hinata’s hand just out of their line of sight—how his fingers grasp at Kageyama’s wrist and pull him, insistent, toward the open doors.

Kageyama looks back over his shoulder, and it’s been months but the image of him is so clear to Koushi then—floating somewhere between a before and a now, eyes looking behind, his wrist still held fast in Hinata’s grip, for all that it would be easy to wrench it away. Koushi nods, makes a gentle shooing motion with his hand.

“Go on. We’ll catch up later.”

When they’re a few steps ahead and out of earshot Daichi reaches down, and grins when Koushi laces their fingers together. “Hinata didn’t tell you about the holding hands, I guess?”

Koushi shakes his head, smiling. He’s not even sure Hinata knows what it means, yet. Someday, he will. They’ll learn it together, the two of them, and everything that comes with holding hands—the reassurances of touch and time and things that can go unsaid, difficult conversations. But they seem happy to linger here, on the threshold of all these new things, and Koushi finds he’s happy to watch them half at a distance like this, one foot in another life and Daichi by his side.

For a while he’s all out of words, but this is the quietest it’s been inside his head for a long time, and there’s an ease to the way his breaths have been coming in the last few minutes that feels entirely new.

“No,” Koushi says at last, tugs Daichi the last few steps toward the gym, where he can hear it all already—voices old and new, footfalls on the floor, Ukai’s whistle shrill and tinny in their ears. “He left that part out.”


End file.
